Developing a distributed real-time monitoring system to track UAVs

Over the last two decades, the development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has shown to be feasible in order to perform several tasks with a certain degree of risk. These tasks were previously held by conventional manned aircrafts. Nowadays, current UAVs employment has brought economic benefits in agriculture, energy, public safety and telecommunication areas, among others, considering operational costs, maintenance, and safety. The Air Force, Army, and Navy under the Brazilian Department of Defense are developing a UAV in the so-called Veículo Aéreo Não Tripulado (VANT) Project. The Brazilian Aeronautics Institute of Technology (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica - ITA) in its Software Engineering Research Group worked in a Preliminary Testing Monitoring Station (PTMS) (Estação de Monitoramento de Ensaios Preliminares - EMEP). The PTMS is considered a key part of the VANT Project. Therefore, the major contribution herein reports a complete development life-cycle using state-of-the-art practices provided by System Engineering, Rational Unified Process (RUP), Military Standards, Model-Driven Development (MDD), and Integrated - Computer Aided Software Engineering - Environment (I-CASE-E) tools. Finally, the effective use of these modern approaches has enabled the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) to be developed, integrated on-time, and to work as expected and specified.